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27 idiotic mental health ‘experts’

Dalrymple writes that The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (2017) is

principally an echo chamber for the thoughts and feelings of those who abominate Mr Trump.

The authors relay their political preferences rather than provide any independent or dispassionate knowledge.

Dalrymple’s chief objection to the book

is not so much its transgression of a rule of professional ethics, but its profound, though predictable, banality.

Psychological ‘diagnosis’ of this kind

amounts to little more than re-description of easily and publicly observable traits and conduct. Anyone reading the 360 pages of this book will probably come away with nothing new to him, no fact that he did not know before, and no opinion that he had not heard before.

The explanatory value of the diagnoses offered by the ‘experts’ is

virtually nil.

For example,

we know that Mr Trump has narcissistic personality disorder because he is narcissistic; he is narcissistic because he has narcissistic personality disorder. This is the kind of ‘explanation’ that Molière ridiculed: opium produces sleep because it has within it a dormitive property.

Trump, the book informs us,

lacks self-esteem. That is why he is so narcissistic. He is always trying desperately to compensate for his permanently damaged self-conception.

Of course, says Dalrymple,

if he were a morbidly shy and retiring man, the same lack of self-esteem would explain it. In effect, then, the same factor explains everything from the grossest exhibitionism to the most profound social withdrawal.